Halcyon Time
by Celeste Goodchild
Summary: Three drabbles for the challenge to write about the childhood of a character. Two are mild SaionjiTouga, the third Nanami-centric.


A series of drabbles written for the utenadrabble community on livejournal. The challenge was to do something with the characters as children. These are my forays into those halcyon days.

**_learn to be still_****, rated pg-13. a kind of touga/saionji (young character challenge). 717 words.  
  
**

He found Nanami first, but then she was always easily found. Even when they hadn't been playing the game for hours, the fun worn thin by too many hours of play and the heavy sound of the incessant rain on the tall glass windows, it was easy to find Nanami. Kyouichi thought it was because she just _wanted_ to be found. Not necessarily by him, of course – but when he found her, it did mean she could be reunited with her brother all the same.   
  
She was so predictable. It could be charming but it was tiresome now, and it was the only reason Kyouichi asked her to stay in the library where he found her under her father's desk. He had not had Touga alone this entire rainy day and he wanted his best friend to himself, if only for a moment.  
  
He did think Nanami's hiding place odd as he left her pouting alone in the library. One of the reasons she was so predictable was because she often hid in the place just vacated by Touga in the last round of hide and seek.   
Touga never hid in his father's library.  
  
It didn't take him long to find Touga in one of the hallway cupboards. He'd never questioned it, but he always found it strangely easy to locate his friend in such games. No, what he found truly odd was the way that Touga reached out and pulled him into the small space when he opened the door on him, plunging them both back into near-total darkness.  
  
Kyouichi, pressed up against Touga's slim body, stared at the thin sword of light running across the bottom of the door at their feet and frowned. "Touga, I found you--"  
  
"Shoosh," Touga said softly; his fingers were too warm as he pressed them over Kyouichi's lips, stopped him mid-sentence. "You don't have to be so loud."  
  
He tried to lower his voice (for Touga; he rarely understood the elder boy's whims but he always did try) but he was afraid he didn't really succeed. "Why?"  
  
"I want to stay hidden for a little while longer."  
  
He couldn't help but repeat the word, foolish as he might sound. "Why?"  
What he loved most about his best friend, is that the other nine-year-old never mocked his sillier moments. "Because I want to."  
  
"But I found you already. Nanami will wonder--"  
  
"Let her wonder. It won't hurt her."  
  
"Maybe not, but--"  
  
Touga's hair tickled his face as the other boy leaned closer, sighed. The Kiryuu mansion was oversized, and Kyouichi always felt like a mouse living in a house built for elephants when he walked the corridors, but this closet was oddly small. He could feel so much of warm, quiet Touga pressed up against him in this broom closet with no brooms in it, and he wondered why Touga had chosen to hide here. He'd never hidden here before in these games.  
  
"I like it in here," Touga said quietly, finally. "I feel safe in here."  
  
"Safe from what?"  
  
"Everything I need to be safe from."  
  
They'd touched a thousand times before, of course; playful fists and friendly slaps on the back, fingers brushing while moving checker pieces across a board. Somehow this all seemed different in this darkness and this silence.  
  
"Touga, the game is over--"  
  
Touga pressed against him, pressed his hand over his mouth again, one hand lingering on his hip. In the silence he could hear Nanami's little feet, petulant against the floorboards as she called for her brother. Touga's lips were too close to his ear as he breathed the words into his ear, and he could not help but shiver under their whispering touch.   
  
"Learn to be still, Kyouichi."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"So I can have you all to myself, just for a moment."  
  
They only stayed in the closet perhaps a minute after Nanami walked past with childish hands balled in childish fists. Later Kyouichi hardly remembered the warmth of Touga's touch, the power of having his friend pressed up against him for so long in such an odd place. His mind was too preoccupied with the thought that not only did he want Touga all to himself sometimes, but that Touga could sometimes wish for the same from him.

*****

**_higher_****, rated pg. a kind of touga/saionji (young character challenge). 530 words.  
  
**

"Maybe we should go inside now."  
  
But then, Touga never had been one for following rules. Sometimes that made Kyouichi sad though he never knew quite why; usually he just accepted it as a part of who Touga was. His transcendence above the mundane rarely pushed Kyouichi away from Touga, after all…not like the others. No, it only drew him closer.  
  
"Let's not," and though the words were distant, dream-laced, they still had a command that was purely Touga. "It's not dark yet. We can stay out longer."  
  
And so Kyouichi followed his lead, two boys standing on swings in an empty park as twilight crawled down to the horizon. They were motionless for only a brief moment in the silence, then Touga began to move. For maybe five minutes they stood atop the swings and swung themselves higher, one never going much further than the other…the other who always caught up in the end.  
  
Kyouichi stopped first. He leapt from the still-moving swing with all the clumsy grace of a child who knows nothing is ill with the world, and moved across to his friend.  
  
"What are you doing?"  
  
"You'll go higher if I push you," he pointed out, motioning for him to slow down.  
  
"I will." Touga watched him carefully, the gesture pricklingly adult. "But I'd rather you just swing with me."  
  
"No, it's okay," Kyouichi insisted as Touga slowed to speak with him, moving around behind Touga to push him on the swing. His hands, already calloused by many hours and days with his shinai, were sure against Touga's back as he pushed him higher than either of them had gone alone, then stood back to watch.  
  
Touga swung high and alone for maybe a minute before he stopped; when he climbed down from the near-motionless swing, it was with far more elegance than Kyouichi had used. "It's dark now," he said quietly, moving to where the bike and the two shinai were propped up against the tree. There was something peculiar in Touga's tone – it wasn't his weirdly adult tone, nor his distant dreaming one…it was the rare, uncomfortable voice of a friend lost in a place the one nearest to them could never hope to understand.  
  
Kyouichi shifted by the swings, cold hands moving into his pockets without thought. "Yeah. I can barely see you."  
  
Touga put his hand on his shoulder when he went to get on the bike, behind Touga as always. "It's too dark to ride, I think."  
  
"It's okay, Touga."  
  
Touga's eyes caught the pale moonlight for a moment, flashed silver instead of blue. "I don't want to lead you into the dark, Kyouichi."  
  
"You've done it before," and he had. Touga did love to stay out until twilight crossed the sky, after all. Still, something seemed to have changed tonight and Kyouichi wished he knew what it had been. Yes, Touga did seem to live in a different world sometimes, but usually it didn't bother him…but tonight, it did.  
  
Touga sighed, looked away from his friend. "I just don't want to do it. Not tonight."  
  
In the end they walked the bike home, side by side under the waning moon.

*****

**_flowers for you_, rated g. nanami-centric (young character challenge). 438 words.**

Nanami loved daisy-chains, but her five-year-old fingers were too clumsy to make them look like anything more than a lumpy, bumpy mess of crushed petals and broken stalks. She hated the inelegant messes that she made, but then she had only started liking the flower-crowns because Touga had started making them for her.

Touga was busy today, bent over his homework on one of the spindly chairs on the patio. Nanami was under the apple tree – still far too early for apples, the branches only held blossoming flowers with delicate pink petals – in her favourite yellow dress, picking at the little flowers.

"Oniisama," she called, looking at the chain in her hands and wondering why it couldn't be as pretty as what her brother's clever fingers could make, "oniisama, I need help."

"I'm busy, Nanami," he said back, not looking up from his books. The pen scratched across the page without pause. "You can make your own daisy-chains, all right?"

"No," and she frowned as she held the muddled crown up to the sun. "It doesn't look right."

"You have to learn to do things for yourself, Nanami."

She frowned deeper. "But they look so much nicer when you help me."

"I can't always help you, Nanami," and he went back to his work completely even though he'd not once looked up at her.

Nanami stayed under the blossoming apple-tree for perhaps only another ten minutes. When she tired finally of the flowers that would not tie together properly without her brother's clever fingers to steady hers (so clumsy and babyish they were!), she took up her tangled chain and took it inside. 

"What happened to your daisy-chain, Nanami?" Touga asked she walked back to the table on the patio; she held her head high as she smiled at him, sat down across from him to watch him work.

"I threw it away."

Touga looked up from his work now, pen stilling. "Why did you do that?"

Nanami hopped down from the table again, wondered if perhaps inside she could find some cookies. "It was stupid without your help, so I didn't want it anymore."

Later on that evening when Touga came back inside, he gave her a beautifully wrought daisy-chain made of perfect little flowers of white and gold. He crowned her with it, kissed her forehead, and Nanami wore it every day until the petals withered and the chain fell to pieces. In the end she never threw it into the trash can as she had hers. She just took the broken pieces out onto the patio and watched them blow away into the blue sky.

*****


End file.
